


Black Widow: Fallen Angel

by ApocalypticPhoenix



Category: Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (Marvel Movies), The Avengers (Marvel) - All Media Types
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2016-02-08
Updated: 2016-02-08
Packaged: 2018-05-18 23:48:40
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 2
Words: 6,144
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5947945
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ApocalypticPhoenix/pseuds/ApocalypticPhoenix
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The Black Widow is a hero. But she wasn’t always one, and heroes aren’t made so cheap. In this case, the making of a hero begins with a villain.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

 

**5:30pm. 1 st of December, 2005. The Kremlin.**

Aleksandr Novichkov was a rather portly middle-aged man, aged forty nine, who just so happened to be one of the most powerful men in Russia. His grandfather had been fortunate enough to own land that had a significant amount of oil located on it, land that Aleksandr and his father had carefully developed until they had become oil magnates in their own right. In the aftermath of the fall of the Iron Curtain, their hold on the Russian oilfields had only tightened, to the point of near complete monopoly until the day Aleksandr (his father having passed away) had been invited to try his luck in the corridors of power. The fact that the price of crude oil dropped by over fifty percent overnight had nothing to do with this offer.

Novichkov had ascended over the years to become the Russian Minister of Finance, applying the skills he had learnt at his father’s knee, honed over two decades of overseeing his family’s business empire, to making Russia an economic power once more. It had taken him nearly a decade to do it, but Russia had been dragged, kicking and screaming from the disorganised economic rabble left to him by his predecessors into one that could proudly call itself one of the largest in the modern world. He had risen through the ranks of the United Russia party, and was one of the lieutenants in the President’s confidence. He glanced impatiently at the antique grandfather clock, resplendently displayed beside the ornate wooden door. It was precisely six o’clock. He was done for today, he decided. 

With a pudgy finger, he stabbed the intercom. ‘Have my car ready for me in fifteen minutes’ he said to his assistant, releasing the button before she could reply. He stood up and stretched, moaning softly as the kinks in his back made themselves known with a vengeance – an unfortunate consequence of having a desk job as involved as his was. Particularly given his position of trust with the current President. It was whispered that he would be a shoe-in for the Presidency once the current leader was gone. After the President and the Prime Minister, he was perhaps the third or fourth most powerful man in Russia.

After a perfunctory check to see if there were any more documents he needed to, he closed the door to his office and began striding to the car park, his guard detail falling in around him.

As the armoured car began to move away, no one noticed a shadow peeling away from a concrete pillar, hand holding a phone to their head.

‘He’s on his way.’

_

**6:12pm. 1 st of December, 2005. Moscow’s slums.**

To his colleagues and the rest of the Russian populace, Aleksandr Novichkov was an upstanding citizen – a reputation he had carefully cultivated over his political career. He served as the conscience, the counterpoint to many of his colleagues’ ruthlessness and corruption. Quite simply, a true born Russian patriot. That was the public face he presented to the world. But every man had a dark side…

The car pulled up outside a small, non-descript house. ‘That will be all’ he said to his guard detail as he stepped out. ‘Stay here. See to it that I am not disturbed.’

He hurried inside; it wouldn’t do for any of his political rivals to catch a whiff of what he was doing at this particular house. Indispensable he might be, but even he could be replaced with time, so he could hardly allow himself to be caught visiting a brothel, not could he? Novichkov was greeted with a tastefully understated décor as he strode in. Another time, he might have taken a few moments to admire it, but after a long day like this one, he wanted nothing more than to relax and unwind. And so he moved straight towards the rather provocatively dressed matron who, despite being fifty years of age, looked at least ten years younger. ‘The usual, Mr Novichkov?’ she asked him calmly.

‘I feel like changing it up a little today, madam’ he smiled lecherously, a smile that only widened as she walked away into a side corridor, shamelessly admiring the sway of her hips. A few minutes later, and all the prostitutes were being paraded past him. Aleksandr had rather…’special’ tastes when it came to sexual partners. He very much liked children. So, as he looked over the sex workers, one in particular caught his eye: a tiny young girl, about eleven or twelve years old, he judged, in a sheer white nightgown that had him salivating. Fiery red hair was kept tame by a simple hairpin that had it in a neat bob. A strong, yet somehow infinitely delicate facial structure – like fine china, he thought – leapt out at him, tempered with somewhat fearful, yet nevertheless composed bright emerald eyes.

‘This one.’ He said, pointing to her. ‘A virgin?’

The matron nodded.

‘I see, charge it to my card’ he said dismissively, taking the child’s hand and tugging her gently into a private room, where they could remain undisturbed for the rest of the night.

_

If nothing else, Aleksandr Novichkov was an extraordinarily competent Minister for Finance. But his budgets had suggested cutting off funding to the Red Room, and so he had to die. As the young girl followed him, she ran her mind back through the plan. Novichkov was deathly allergic to bees, she knew from reading her files. Her hairpin was hollow, filled with two millilitres of pure distilled apitoxin. More than enough to kill the man. Now she just had to kill him without ever leaving a distinguishable mark…that and preferably without him defiling her, she already felt uneasy with the way he was mentally undressing her. She studied him out of the corner of her eyes, resolutely forcing away the distaste and the urge to snap the hand that was slowly descending down her back.

_Tired, weary, long day at work…I could offer to help him relax somehow to buy some time…that would be preferable…but how to do so?_

She let none of her rumination on her face, of course; she was far too well trained to ever let something so vital slip. Instead, she plastered a look of fear onto her face – that was probably what a normal girl would be feeling, she guessed – as Novichkov closed the door with a resounding _click_.

Novichkov spied a bottle of wine resting on a nearby table and sighed in content. ‘Get on the bed’ he told the girl and made to pour himself a glass of wine. He sat down on the bed, draining his glass in a single gulp. As he shrugged off his outer clothing, the young girl silently approached him and began massaging his stiff shoulders and back.

‘ _Oh_ ’ he sighed, unconsciously leaning towards her at the sudden, blissful cessation of pain. He glanced at his feet, cramped from the sheer, bone deep cold that seemed to fill every bit of Moscow in winter. He left out a soft moan as she stopped for a moment, before moving down to his feet. He gulped down another glass of wine and moved a little, so that he was now leaning back against the headboard. He half-closed eyes, relishing the odd mix of pleasure and pain as she expertly worked his feet. Aleksandr tensed slightly as her fingers dug into a particularly stubborn knot, before bonelessly collapsing as it loosened. Already a little tipsy and lost in the dubious pleasure of having a girl who was young enough to be his daughter have her hands all over him, Novichkov never felt the sudden, momentary tiny pinprick under his left big toe.

The female kept massaging him for a minute, until his eyes closed shut completely. The moment they were, she slipped over to the bottle of wine, hefting her hairpin-cum-syringe, and squirted out the last of the apitaxin inside, before doing up her hair again. All this took a matter of seconds.

She didn’t spare the man a glance even as a light froth foamed at his slowly blueing lips– why would she? It was done. He was dead. The Red Room was safe. In the end, despite his arrogance, his wealth, his power…Aleksandr Novichkov was just one of many who had felt the widow’s bite.

_

**Moscow, 1998.**

_Fire. A woman, dancing amongst the flames, felling men left and right as they fired at her. A spray of blood filled the air as she shoved a man right into a hailstorm of bullets. A knife flew out of nowhere, buried itself deep within her chest._

_The woman gasped for air, even as her lungs filled, that precious, nourishing fluid choking her to an unsightly end. And in the flames, a young howl of loss and pain filled the air. The howl of a child that had just lost their mother, her life taken right in front of her._

_The faceless men jabbered back and forth amongst themselves as they grabbed and hauled her out of the fire._

_‘The asset is secured’ one of them said. ‘I still don’t see what’s so important about this one. Why couldn’t we just have grabbed a girl from an orphanage like the others?’_

_‘You’re not paid to think. You’re paid to do as I say. Trust me. This one…this one is special.’_

_‘Not sure how a five year old can be anything special.’_

_‘I repeat, you’re not paid to think. Now let’s get out of the cold.’_

_

**7:48pm. 28 th December, 2005. A warehouse on the docks of Vladivostok.**

It was almost too easy. The young girl – thirteen, now – crouched, navigating the warehouse silently with nary a sound. She ran the numbers through her head. Ten guards, all split up into two and three man teams. A few cameras, high in the rafters and dotting the walls. Her mark was inside the warehouse office, awaiting the US agents retrieving him. With the cover of the night, long shadows yawned across the room, the only light coming from pale, flickering torches, dancing around as their owners moved back and forth. As the Americans said, she thought, ‘easy peasy’. She remained, secure in the shadows, emerald eyes staring unblinkingly at the patrol team she was surveilling.

Her masters had miscalculated. For all his faults, Novichkov was a shrewd man – shrewd enough to have a dead man’s switch. Though, apparently, not shrewd enough to keep evidence of such a switch off the papers kept in his safe. One man, carrying documents that implicated the existence of the Red Room to be taken straight to SHIELD. At least, that was the idea. In the process of examining his papers, the girl and her superiors had deduced the one man he would trust with knowledge of such documents. From there it was a simple matter of asking the right questions, the right amount of encouragement and assurances, and they had tracked down the man here to Vladivostok. Intelligence indicated that his SHIELD associates were readying him for an extraction, so it was the girl’s job now to ensure the one loose end in their operation was taken care of.

‘I’m going to the toilet. Need to take a dump’ one of the guards announced. His partner grunted and flapped his hand grouchily in reply, rubbing his hands together. Even bundled down with a thick heavy coat and three layers of clothing – at least, she could only see two and could make out the faint outline of a third – the biting cold was probably enough to stop a mammoth in its tracks, let alone a human. She waited until the first man was out of sight before making her move; still in her crouch, she moved behind them, until she was bare inches away. Close enough to breathe onto them. Had she been a lesser person, her eyebrow would have twitched. She had forgotten to take into account how tiny she was compared to them by dint of age – they were far too tall for her to comfortably slash their neck. No matter.

She jumped; smoothly, her left hand clamped firmly over their mouth. Her legs snapped around their neck in a depraved mockery of a vice. She twisted with all the strength in her tiny body, and was rewarded with dull crack – soft enough that with the wind howling outside, she doubted anyone would hear it. As the guard’s body fell like a stone, she leaned to the side and braced its weight as well as her own with both hands. Her arms quivered with the effort of holding them both, shakily sliding across the cold, icy floor. But their job was done – the body’s descent was practically silent. One down. Quick as thought, she moved to the toilet corridor. The moment the door opened, the man was greeted with a knife through his skull, driven right through his eye socket as the girl dropped from above. He died quickly.

The girl scowled, glancing around the warehouse. Those two were the easy ones – the other eight or so guards all were in eyesight of each other. There was no way she’d be able to pick them one by one without being noticed. She glanced around and smiled coldly. Perhaps she didn’t have to.

_

‘Remind me again as to why exactly we’re guarding this piece of shit again’ Jasper Sitwell asked his commanding officer, John Garrett, Agent of SHIELD, level seven.

‘Because, Sitwell, he has information pertaining to a known network of assassins that has confounded SHIELD since World War Two’ Garrett ground out. He checked the time. One hour till they could wash the defecting Russian off their hands. He frowned. ‘Hey, is it just me, or -’

Before Garrett could finish his sentence, a shipping container smashed right into him and his partner.

_

She smiled thinly. _Just as predicted_. She tapped a button on the inside of her forearm; moments later, another volley of crates and shipping containers flew out at the agents milling around their crushed superiors, propelled by the force of several tiny grenades. She moved quickly; in the chaos, none of the agents milling below even noticed a slim, almost invisible figure rising up to the rafters, suspended by nothing but a slim cord. She took a mental stock take of her arsenal. Two knives. Sleeping gas pellets. Smoke pellets. Garrotte wire. Some prototype taser discs. A pistol.

The young assassin worked quickly; she managed to squeeze off four shots before they could react. Every one of them struck her targets in the head. Without a moment’s hesitation, she threw herself off the beam, hurtling downwards, right towards the gap between two piles of crates with all the grace and poise of an experienced ballerina. Mere moments before she cracked her head on the cold hard ground, her hands shot out towards the crates and caught their edges, directing all of her momentum forward and up. Her feet met another agent’s face, knocking them out cold. As she dropped to the floor her fingers curled around her knife and flicked out at their throat; a spray of blood filled the air.

Eight down. Two more to go. She glanced up, just in time to see the door to the office slam shut. And then the world stilled around her, a gloved hand clamped over her mouth, a forearm began crushing her throat, and black spots were starting to fill her vision. She didn’t panic, though; she had experienced situations like this far too many times to even blanch. Calmly – as much as she could with someone trying to choke her into unconsciousness, anyway – she flipped the knife in her hand and stabbed backwards, driving it deep into her captor’s thigh. Their grip slackened slightly, enough that with a sudden twist, she broke away from them just enough that another stab found her knife  buried deep within their stomach. Then their throat.

One left, excluding the target. She plucked out two taser discs and tossed them underneath the door. Perhaps now was the time to see if they worked. Moments later, a crackling filled the air and the stench of burned flesh wafted to her nostrils. She opened the door and fired two shots.

_

_‘Well, what’s her name?’_

_‘Does it matter?’_

_‘Saves me the trouble making up a fake one.’_

_The burly man sighed and turned to the girl. ‘What’s your name?’ he barked out, slapping her out of glazed apathy, still in shock. She blinked slowly. As the man raised his hand again, the child – barely six years old – flinched, scrabbling backwards and said shakily, ‘N-Natalia Ali-Alianov-novna R-Romanova.’_

_‘Natalia Alianovna Romanova’ the scientist said clinically, writing it down. He smiled at her callously. ‘Beautiful name. You won’t be needing it for the time being, though. Strap her down and intubate her’ he commanded._

_As the girl was forced onto the bare grey slab of cool metal, thrashing uselessly against the bulky man’s grip, the scientist sighed, ‘Oh, do be quiet. There is no need for chatter from test subjects. As a test subject, you have no rights. Besides, you should be proud to serve your for the greater good as a member of this program’. He turned back to his desk and scribbled something down as he dictated to himself. ‘Subject number one, name: Natalia Aliavnovna Romanova. Gas her, we don’t need her thrashing around during the experiment. Where was I? Oh yes. Natalia Romanova. Injecting with strain 32-A of enhanced soldier serum.’_

_A few minutes later had the unconscious girl – still clad in sooty pyjamas – with enough tubes stabbing into her that she might well have passed for an ER patient. A light blue fluid began running through those tiny plastic pipelines, starting the process of forging her body into something more. Into the body of what would one day be hailed world’s most feared covert operative. A terrorist. A saviour. A villain. A hero. An Avenger._

_That day was the day that the Black Widow was born._

 


	2. Chapter 2

**12:43, 17 th June, 2006. Grecian beach bordering the Aegean Sea. **

Anatoly Kozlovsky checked his watch discreetly as he lifted his glass of cognac. Five minutes until the deadline. It had been a long road for the boy who had grown up in Stalinist Russia – from eking out a meagre living on the Siberian steppes to becoming one of the world’s greatest power brokers. A leader of HYDRA – an organisation that like him had evolved over the decades. History had shown that outright displays of power, no matter how frightening, would only invite resistance. No, the only way to save the world from itself was to direct it from the shadows – to see that the chaos and upheaval without an overarching authority would see humanity tear itself apart. And only the leaders of HYDRA had the will and the foresight to guide humanity to its golden age.

Even as a young intelligence officer of a mere two and a half decades in the 1980s Kozlovsky had seen this. And so his fellow sympathisers had arranged for him to disappear off the books into the shadows where the world’s destiny was being shaped. He had long since proven himself to be an excellent agent whilst working for the KGB. It had been a simple matter to be quietly transferred into HYDRA’S black ops program – one of the three cells operating today. The Red Room. He was in his late forties now but looked like a man ten years his junior, with only a few grey streaks in his hair and a few wrinkles around his forehead – one of the blessings his association with HYDRA had bestowed him with. As he raised his glass again a slight cough sounded in front of him.

Ah, perfect. His fellow HYDRA leader was here.

‘I do hope I’m not interrupting’ Aldrich Killian said stiffly. Kozlovsky stifled a snort as he took in the Eurasian: he was tall and powerfully built, certainly, but his bearing just screamed out ‘outsider’.  Honestly, who on earth wore a suit to the beach?

‘Please, sit down’ he said cordially – as cordial one could be whilst contemplating how to kill the idiot in front of them anyway. He could already see the hushed looks, the curious wonderings of the locals. He raised the bottle. ‘Would you like some?’

‘Of course’ Killian said faux-amicably. Ah. There was the leader of HYDRA’s technological division AIM. And so, in the sunny locale of Grecian coastal paradise, they discussed how they would make HYDRA great once more. One way or another, Kozlovsky knew that they would finish what the Red Skull had started.

_

**09:00, 29 th June , 2008. Red Room Headquarters, Siberia.**

Instinct, ingrained from years of experience in the KGB and then in the Red Room was the only warning Kozlovsky had that his current aide was in the room.

‘You have a conference scheduled now, sir’ she said.

‘Ah yes, thank you Ms. Moneypenny’ he said drolly, idly spinning around in his office chair like a child high on a sugar rush. He came to a sudden stop, and all levity left him as he speared her with a cool gaze. He waited until she had left the room and all security measures were engaged before he opened his laptop. A few clicks and keystrokes later and he was logged into what was possibly the most secure online messaging forum in the Northern Hemisphere, courtesy of sister organisation Advanced Idea Mechanics. And – unknowingly of course – SHIELD’s own technological research. Captain America and his Howling Commandos must be rolling in their graves, he thought wryly. Just a few seconds later, a small phone icon popped up on the screen. _Accept or decline?_

He clicked accept. Instantly, the screen split into two. One each for his fellow leaders.

‘Gentlemen’ he greeted.

They inclined their heads in acknowledgement. Greetings were a waste of words, so no time was spent on further pleasantries. After all, they were not friends. They were merely people who shared the same vision for the world. The three people in the e-conference were collectively the executive board of the HYDRA of the new era.

For all the Red Skull’s ambition and cunning, he had an ego to match. When he had disappeared with Captain America, HYDRA had been shattered very nearly beyond repair. But his few remaining lieutenants – Wolfgang von Strucker, Baron Zemo, Arnim Zola – had been prepared. Even so, perhaps the Skull’s vision of a new world order might have ended with World War Two, but for an incredible gamble relying completely on the weakness of human nature. In the wake of Allied victory, drunk on success Churchill and Truman had made a critical error. One that would see the stagnant society that they had fought so hard to preserve be wiped from the annals of history with true utopia.

Operation Paperclip.

Drunk in his nation’s crowning moment of glory, President Truman had quietly authorised the relocation of some one and a half thousand Nazi scientists to maintain its growing power. Among them were the scientists that had studied the mysterious power source Captain America had reported powering the Red Skull’s army. The Tesseract.

Chief among them had been Arnim Zola, who had beheld the Tesseract in person. Slowly, whilst the nascent agency of SHIELD squandered its resources searching for the lost Captain and the Tesseract, Zola and his compatriots had overseen the rebirth of HYDRA. By the time Zola had died in the early 1970s, he and his colleagues had turned perhaps a hundred SHIELD members. Including a young SHIELD agent by the name of Alexander Pierce. The same Pierce who was now the Secretary of the World Security Council. Former US Secretary of Defence.

At the same time, the Skull’s lieutenants had activated every single agent they had planted inside Soviet forces – a simple matter considering the vacuum left behind by Stalin’s great purge. They had arranged for the safety of many of the remaining HYDRA loyalists. When the arms race had started in earnest in the 1950s, the Red Room’s genesis had been all but assured. And as for Advanced Idea Mechanics? It had been surprisingly easy to convince the think tank that HYDRA was the only way forward.

‘I need hardly remind you all that after neutralising the traitor Litvinenko in the nick of time that this Project Clean Sweep is crucial to putting us back on the map,’ Alexander Pierce said. ‘Our goal is as it ever was since our reconstitution; let slip the dogs of war and unleash chaos that can only be healed by HYDRA’s order.’

The younger men waited patiently whilst the Secretary took a sip of water. After a long moment, he spoke again: ‘You will have read in the papers that the heads of state of almost every sovereign nation will be meeting on neutral soil, in Wakanda some months from now. They claim that it is to rebuild the world economy. As is their wont, they will vacillate back and forth, make obfuscating promises…and do absolutely nothing. It is during this conference that we shall strike. The world is lost because it follows blind leaders. But we are the future, and we are here now. The time for such bumbling incompetence is at an end.’

‘You plan to announce HYDRA to the world by killing them all?’ Killian said drily, leaning back into his leather-backed swivel chair with all the arrogance of a wolf of Wall Street.

‘Not at all, Mr Killian. What I have in mind is far more simple. HYDRA was founded on the belief that humanity could not be trusted with its own freedom. But as World War Two showed, if we try to take that freedom by force, they resist. And thus, humanity must surrender its freedom willingly for any lasting peace. To do that, we must first show them – show the world – how incompetent their leaders are. How, as millions die, they wine and dine without care for their citizens. Major Kozlovsky? Have you given the matter your attention?’

‘Absolutely,’ he rasped. It held just the slightest trace of danger, like a snake slithering unseen through the grass. ‘Mr Killian and I have spent the past month preparing for this operation. And while on the face of it this appears to be quite a complex operation, I am pleased to report that the nearly all the resources we need are already at our disposal. Agents. Extremis. And a few items my agents are appropriating for our cause at this moment.’

‘Major? Mr Killian?’

There was nothing more for him to say. ‘Kozlovsky has sent his best agent to acquire the material for AIM for, ah, _modification_ ’ the scientist said after a long pause. ‘As to this conference with its high ideals, I can assure you that we need not worry. I am very happy to assure you all that by the end of the year the world will be purer and thank us for it. And the age of HYDRA will have begun.’

‘And who is this agent?’

‘My best student,’ Kozlovsky said with what might have been the faintest trace of pride. ‘The fastest to ever graduate from the Black Widow program.’

He licked his lips and tasted her name on his tongue.

 _Natalia Romanova_.

-

**11:13, 25 th December, 2001. Red Room Headquarters, Siberia.**

_Three years. Three years since she had been taken from her home for him to shape her into the assassin he and his superiors needed. She had been stubborn at first, of course. Resistant. But she was far too important to risk killing, and so he had been uncharacteristically patient. And he had been rewarded for his restraint. She possessed an intelligence that was far beyond that of her peers, soaking in knowledge like a sponge. After a mere two years of instruction, she had already gained fluency in English and Mandarin Chinese, and had been well on the way to it in another four. She had learned quickly after the first few beatings and missed meals that failure was not tolerated._

_One day, Kozlovsky remembered fondly, he had even been able to leave her outside for a few hours to think over her incompetence. He wasn’t afraid of her somehow escaping – she was still only a child after all, and in any case where would she go? The nearest human settlement was days away and that was without taking into account the fact that she was naked and had no idea where she was anyway. No, as far he was concerned, she would either die, in which case she had been nothing more than a waste of time, or she would live and continue to provide him with the challenge of breaking her._

_In the three years that she had been under his wing, Kozlovsky had never quite been able to manage to break her completely. Sure, he had been able to make her cry – one of his fondest memories had been beating and whipping her bloody and throwing her into a cell to freeze – but, he had never quite managed to make that faint light of defiance in those emerald green eyes disappear. But she hadn’t yet begun to bathe in blood. That changed today._

_He stepped up to the podium, peering down at the two young girls facing each other. Romanova and some other girl...Rasskazova, if he recalled correctly. At a nod from him, they began circling, studying each other for weaknesses. It was Rasskazova who finally gave in, lunging in with a strike at Romanova’s head – only for Romanova to sway before lashing out with her leg. It was almost like a tennis match, Kozlovsky thought. Parry. Strike. Dodge._

_It continued like this for several minutes, the two girls moving almost faster than the human eye could see, a combination of both their training and the serums coursing through their bloodstreams. In the end, and as expected, it was Natalia who stood victorious; after the first few preliminary minutes of feeling out her opponent, Romanova had gone completely on the offensive, slowly driving them back, yet at the same time, pulling her blows just enough so that it seemed they were nearly equal. Until Rasskazova’s head struck the wall, as she jumped back from a final, sweeping leg. Stunned, she found herself on the floor, Romanova’s knee digging into her back, hands daintily placed on either side of her neck._

_Kozlovsky descended upon them silently. After a long, terse silence, he inclined his head to Romanova and offered her a slow clap. ‘Finish her’ he commanded, gaze intently trained on her face. This was the moment, he knew._

_She hesitated, the ruthlessness ingrained in her over the past three years and the innate,_ disgusting _compassion that was at her core warring – and the ruthlessness won, for a second later, she sharply twisted her arms, and the other girl fell limp to the ground._

_‘Next time, you will not hesitate’ Kozlovsky said simply._

_‘No. I will not.’ Romanova said slowly, eyes fixed on the young girl she had just killed with her bare hands. The director was pleased to see that the tremor that had pervaded her body mere seconds before was already fading._

_‘_ Look _at me when you are speaking. You will not what, Natalia?’ Kozlovsky demanded._

_He hid a grin as her voice hardened and her head tilted to look him in the eye._

_‘Next time, I will not hesitate, master.’_

_For in her eyes, the bright vibrancy that had been there only minutes before was gone, replaced with a dull blankness of shock._ Yes _, he thought to himself._ Now, we can truly begin.

_Out loud, he merely nodded in acknowledgement and said, ‘Merry Christmas.’_

_Silently, he added to himself:_ Heil HYDRA _._

_

**17:54, June 29 th 2008\. Location: just outside Murmansk**

The young woman had been moving through the snow for nearly five hours, insulated from the cold by a snow ghillie suit that had her blending seamlessly against the snow and grey branches of vegetation long since dead from the chill. In front of her was nothing but a single storey high compound. It looked like a derelict old warehouse with its half collapsed roof and doors half-torn off their hinges, hanging awkwardly askew. The building was in fact a former facility of the Biopreparat and while it had fallen into disrepair for nearly decade, for a year now it had been hosting a small delegation of scientists and Spetsnaz agents sent by the Russian Ministry of Defence. To be precise, two scientists and six Spetsnaz agents. If the intelligence could be trusted.

Only a handful of people knew it was still in use; almost all of them were in the building. After today they would be dead.

Natalia stopped crawling. She was about three hundred metres away, she guessed. Slowly, she slid a single slim finger outside, testing the air. No wind. Perfect. Her fingers moved quickly; within a minute her sniper rifle was assembled, barrel just barely poking out of her camouflage. She took a mental inventory. Handguns. Both fully loaded and two extra clips on her belt. Check. Smoke grenades. Check. Knives, check: one holstered to each thigh, one on her belt and a couple more hidden on her body.

She scanned the inside of the warehouse through the scope: there were two guards pacing around…and no-one else. She felt a trickle of doubt. Had they seen her? No, she assured herself as she lowered the rifle by a few millimetres. There it was. A gleaming sliver of metal just barely poking out of the shadowy interior. A trapdoor, then. She let herself relax. All she had to do was wait.

Another half hour came and went before the guards began to change shifts. She watched as they rapped hard on the steel trapdoor and shouted in their walkie-talkies. She returned to the rifle, rolling her shoulders in preparation. The hatch began to swing open as the two guards above ground heaved. Two more clambered out; like their compatriots, they were clad heavily in clothes for the cold, but no armour that she could see. Even so…she adjusted her aim, and fired.

Even with her earmuffs deadening the sound she could make out a low booming crackle; her hands wove hard and fast. They all fell with a single shot, their mouths parted in a soundless shout of surprise and warning.

Now was the time to strike; she shook herself out of the ghillie and sprinted straight towards the warehouse. There was no way that the remaining guards wouldn’t have heard their companions being gunned down, but would they lock down their facility or not? She didn’t plan on waiting to find out; Kozlovsky had made it clear what he’d do to her if she failed him.

Twenty metres away; a hand was reaching out for the rim of the trapdoor. Without breaking stride, her hand flickered and that unfortunate Spetsnaz agent now found that their hand was pinned to the hatch by a knife. A few strides later and a bullet had gone right through his eye-socket. She dived down into the rabbit hole. Except this wasn’t Wonderland and she certainly wasn’t Alice, she thought grimly as she slammed down onto a burly agent. Momentum or not, he was barely fazed and slammed her against the wall; already she could see another Spetsnaz aiming for her head with their assault rifle.

She kneed her captor and in a single smooth motion twirled, looking for all the world like she’d been born to be in the Bolshoi. Perhaps, in another life, she would have been. The moment passed: her captor’s arm snapped, bone jutting out at the elbow and he doubled over a moment later as his companion fired. Whatever poor excuse for body armour didn’t save his life, but the bullets couldn’t punch through front and back, so at least it saved hers. She held the dead man up as a shield. Two seconds later, a _click_ sounded.

She didn’t hesitate; Natalia tossed his dead companion at him, sending him stumbling back, off balance for just a second. An instant later he found himself swallowing a bullet. It didn’t agree with him. Romanova flung the doors to the laboratory open and fired two shots. An hour later, by the time the alarm had been raised in Moscow, she had disappeared. Her wig, contact lenses and facial padding had been discarded. The computer hard drives had been removed. The laboratory notes were burned.

And her lethal cargo had already begun its journey west.

 


End file.
